Since its creation, the medium of television has been used to showcase broad points of view and different cultures. With a country as large as the United States, the identities and lifestyles change drastically from coast-to-coast. Television helps to bridge this gap in cultural differences, but also brings to light experiences not well known or shared.
This project examines coming out narratives in scripted television. Beginning with the 1980s television landscape, we track the acceptance level of characters based on frequency of their airtime. We see that the 1997 coming out of Ellen lead, Ellen Morgan had a cultural shift, with more characters coming out, many of them being series leads. By 2010 when Glee is on the air, many characters are written as LGBTQ+, with no need to create a coming out narrative.
Yet, when looking deeper into the coming out narrative, an interesting revelation occurred. Prior to characters being accepted and written as such, we find a queering of this standard coming out narrative. Whereas a character does not come out on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, but instead comes out as other. Taking the plot points from the coming out tropes and skewing them to make a broader statement on LGBTQ+ society.